U.S. Envoy Tries to Revive Mideast Peace Talks

By JOHN F. BURNS

Published: August 19, 2000

Correction Appended

JERUSALEM, Aug. 18—
The State Department's special peace envoy, Dennis Ross, opened new talks in Jerusalem today with Prime Minister Ehud Barak in an effort to break an impasse in the negotiations for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

But the early signs were that neither side sees much prospect of breaking the impasse on the issue of Jerusalem and other differences that developed at last month's summit meeting at Camp David. After Mr. Ross's meeting with Mr. Barak, and his separate encounter with Saeb Erekat and Muhammed Dahlan, top aides to Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, the Israelis and the Palestinians accused each other of intransigence and said the prospects for a new summit meeting were dim.

Before the meetings, Israeli officials said they had been told that if Mr. Ross succeeded in narrowing the differences, President Clinton would be ready to meet separately in New York next month with Mr. Barak and Mr. Arafat, who plan to attend a gathering of international leaders at the United Nations in early September.

If the New York meetings prove to be successful, the Israeli officials said, Mr. Clinton would then call a new summit meeting, possibly even before the self-imposed deadline of Sept. 13 that both sides set for reaching an accord. Mr. Arafat had also cited that date -- before he began to hedge on the issue earlier this week -- as his own deadline for unilaterally declaring the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

But after today's meetings, the Israelis and the Palestinians both said there would be little point in a new summit meeting as long as the other side remained fixed to the positions that led to the impasse at Camp David: the control of Jerusalem and the return of three million Palestinian refugees.

Mr. Ross was making no predictions about the likely outcome of his talks.

''My focus right now is to meet with each side, spend time with them, see what kind of conclusions they have drawn about the insights that were developed at Camp David, and then see if there are ways to overcome the differences,'' he said. ''There is work to be done. I am out here to try and help the negotiations along, and we will see how best to do that.''

After the meeting, Mr. Barak said he saw no point in a new summit meeting unless Mr. Arafat showed signs of flexibility that were not now evident, Israel radio reported.

The main impasse continues to be the issue of Jerusalem. Essentially, Israel has said it is prepared to grant the Palestinians a limited foothold in Jerusalem, with control of Muslim holy sites in the walled city, the adjoining Muslim and Christian quarters, and Arab villages on the east of the city that lie within its enlarged municipal boundaries. These concessions have caused criticism from right-wing and ultra-Orthodox parties, which have insisted that all of Jerusalem be kept as Israel's ''eternal and undivided'' capital.

Mr. Arafat has toured more than 20 capitals in the Arab world, Europe and Asia since the Camp David talks, seeking backing for his position that Israel must accept United Nations resolutions passed after the Arab-Israeli war in 1967 and hand over all of east Jerusalem, including the Jewish quarter, to a future Palestinian state. Mr. Arafat has said that Palestinians will ''never'' agree to Israel's controlling all of the city's eastern districts, even if it takes generations to recover them.

Mr. Barak made news on Thursday when he referred explicitly, for the first time in public, to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Correction: August 24, 2000, Thursday An article on Aug. 19 about efforts by the American envoy Dennis Ross to revive Israeli-Palestinian talks misstated terms of United Nations Security Council resolutions passed after the 1967 Middle East war. While Resolution 242 called for Israel's armed forces to withdraw ''from territories occupied in the recent conflict,'' no resolution called for Israel to hand over all of east Jerusalem to a future Palestinian state.